How To Resize Hard Disk On Vista

Windows Vista has a built in feature not many people are aware of. Users can resize a hard disk partition on the fly with a Shrink feature. You can use this feature to install another operating system on your computer and dual boot in to either OS. You can also partition your drive to save all your movies, pictures and other videos on a separate partition than the operating system. This will make life a lot easier if and when you might want to install or update your OS without affecting any of your media or data. Ok, let’s get in to the details. For using the repartitioning shrink feature you would need a user with administrative privileges. For repartitioning the hard drive in Vista go to the Control Panel and click System and Maintenance.

Once in the System and Maintenance window scroll to the bottom of the window. Look for Create and format hard disk partitions located in Administrative Tools section.

This will load the Disk Management window. Here all the disk volumes on the computer will be listed along with their size, type and other info. Highlight the volume which you want to split and right click. Notice the Shrink Volume link.

Clicking on the Shrink Volume link will load the utility where you can specify the disk space in Mb that you want to carve out from the volume. The utility will also show a running tally of what the total size is and the disk size before and after the “shrink”. Screenshot is below. Once you click OK the resizing wizard takes care of the rest and you will have unallocated disk space on your computer. You can use it as a backup volume or installing a new operating system or anything else that you want to do with a brand new disk drive.